Scott Bush

I love my iPod Touch. It’s a slick, thin lit­tle beast that does amaz­ing things, like allow me to lis­ten to music and pod­casts, play games, watch videos, and check my e-mail—including attach­ments. The first time I received a PDF attach­ment with my iPod Touch I was excited. Tap once, the load­ing icon spun and sud­denly I’m view­ing the PDF. Reverse pinch and I zoom in to read. Swipe down to scroll to the next page. Intu­itive, sim­ple, right. I read pages of my friend’s screen­play this way, giddy over both the story and how cool I was using this device to read it.

When next I returned to the screen­play, I barely noticed the time it took to swipe down half a dozen pages. And though the iPod remem­bers the posi­tion of the PDF between Mail ses­sions, if I returned to my inbox the PDF would be back at page one the next time I opened it: more swip­ing to get to where I was last time. Not a big deal for the first twenty… or thirty… or forty pages. It gets tedious after that.

“But this is Apple,” I thought as I felt my carpals tun­nel­ing as I madly swiped, try­ing to reach page 73 of the screen­play, “there must be a bet­ter way.” I spent min­utes tap­ping, swip­ing, drag­ging, rotat­ing, shak­ing, and per­form­ing all man­ner of man­ual manip­u­la­tion in the hopes of see­ing a “jump to page” dia­log. No luck. What’s more frus­trat­ing? The inabil­ity to quickly get to a page in a long doc­u­ment or being let down by the com­pany with the best usabil­ity in the industry?

Other peo­ple have noticed it, too. And I while I have no doubt that this was one of those items that Apple engi­neers knew about and wanted to address but was deemed less crit­i­cal (like copy and paste), it’s still frus­trat­ing. It seems so sim­ple: double-tap or per­form another ges­ture and you can enter a page number.

Apple, please add a “jump to page” con­trol for PDFs in the next iPhone/iPod Touch soft­ware update. I’ve got to fin­ish read­ing my friend’s screenplay!

The debates are over so I missed my chance to ask a ques­tion of the can­di­dates myself. But if I had that chance, I know what I’d ask. Well, maybe not. But at least I know the con­di­tion I’d put on the answer: it must be given with­out men­tion­ing his oppo­nent or their party. I want to hear what they’re going to do, not why the other guy won’t do it as well.

Is it really so hard for these politi­cians to frame an answer to, say, their health care reform plat­form or how they plan to reel the coun­try back from the abyss of eco­nomic dis­as­ter with­out trash-talking the other can­di­date? They both acknowl­edge Amer­i­cans are tired of neg­a­tive pol­i­tics, yet they seem inca­pable of ris­ing above them. We–from those ask­ing ques­tions, debate mod­er­a­tors, and ulti­mately each voter–shouldn’t stand for it.

Sup­pose you’ve got two kids, Joe and Jane. If you ask Joe if he’s done his home­work and he responds, “Jane’s not done her home­work for four days, and what she did do before had all kinds of prob­lems,” you’d stop Joe and remind him you didn’t ask about Jane. You’d see that, at best, Joe’s try­ing to dis­tract you from the fact he’d not done his home­work yet, and at worst he’s just cas­ti­gat­ing his sis­ter out of spite. We don’t accept it from our kids, so why do we allow it from our pub­lic servants?

Oh well, only about two more weeks to go.

Recent e-mail from Yahoo!‘s search mar­ket­ing department:

Hello Scott,

Yahoo! is com­mit­ted to the suc­cess of account 0000000000 and we believe there is an oppor­tu­nity to pro­vide you with improved performance.

Hmmm… if they’re so com­mit­ted to my suc­cess, why couldn’t they be both­ered to iden­tify my account with some­thing other than a ten-digit account num­ber (which, for obvi­ous rea­sons, I’ve hid­den)? Oh well, at least they had my first name right, and their sug­ges­tions for the cam­paigns were useful.

A few nights back my wife and I took friends to din­ner at Krua Thai Fam­ily Kitchen in the Uni­ver­sity Dis­trict. In addi­tion to the excel­lent food (I’d rec­om­mend their brown fried rice and their sig­na­ture fried mus­sel dish), I appre­ci­ated their atten­tion to design. The food was plated nicely—something you rarely see at a Thai place. And, when I used the restroom, I was pleas­antly sur­prised to see this:

The smooth rocks gath­ered at the base of the sink told me two things. First, the own­ers cared enough to con­sider the customer’s expe­ri­ence even in the restroom. Sec­ond, although the sink itself wasn’t fancy (and in fact the plas­ter was tear­ing away from the wall!), the water cas­cad­ing over black rocks reminded me of a water­fall: a very nice design touch. I’ll def­i­nitely be back (but to be hon­est, more for the food than the rocks in the sink).

So, I’m enjoy­ing a cof­fee at Zoka’s near Green­lake, and as I step out of the restroom a poster catches my eye: Night of the Liv­ing Dead. Hey, I love George Romero’s genre-defining flick as much as more than the next guy. But what was strik­ing was who was putting on the pro­duc­tion: Seat­tle Children’s Theatre!

Appar­ently, the the­atre has injected camp, com­edy, and a lot of Seat­tle ref­er­ences to make it palat­able to young­sters. Accord­ing to the Seat­tle Times story:

SCT direc­tor Linda Hartzell says her pro­duc­tion is intended for kids 13 and older…

Kids, I know, are desen­si­tized to vio­lence thanks to the expo­sure they receive on TV (any law/cop drama), movies (just about any of them), and video games (Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, etc.). I’m not sug­gest­ing that these things should be reg­u­lated any more than they are; I don’t know enough about it to judge. But I do think that a children’s the­atre should not be remak­ing zom­bie movies into plays for kids. Call me old fash­ioned, but I think such an impor­tant cul­tural and artis­tic venue ought to pro­duce plays that are pos­i­tive, encour­ag­ing, and per­haps chal­leng­ing… but cer­tainly not hor­ri­fy­ing. How­ever jus­ti­fied by the “com­edy” added to it, or the fact that gummy worms stand in for real human intestines, the fact remains that the dead don’t stay dead and come after the liv­ing. That’s not the sort of topic a tween should be deal­ing with; at least, not at a play put on by one of Seattle’s most rep­utable theatres.

All that said, I think a campy pro­duc­tion ver­sion of Romero’s 1968 clas­sic is a good idea—but for adults, not kids.